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Filmmakers struggle for tell story of Canadian HIV crisis

By Bruce DeMaraEntertainment Reporter

Thu., Nov. 29, 2012

Filmmaker Paul Saltzman says he would have an easier time making a documentary about HIV/AIDS if it were set in Africa.

For the past two years, Saltzman (Prom Night in Mississippi), along with filmmakers Simcha Jacobovici (The Naked Archaeologist) and Ric Bienstock and a network of activists across the country, have struggled to find funding and support for a film on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Canada.

Along the way, they’ve faced a wall of complacency and the vestiges of stigma associated with the disease that — despite public perception — remains a serious public health issue for Canadians.

The project’s working title is Reignite because of the need to re-instill a sense of urgency that the crisis here is far from over, Saltzman said. Indeed, Saturday’s annual World AIDS Day highlights a disease that barely registers on the national consciousness the way it once did.

Officials with the Canadian AIDS Society have been frank from the outset about the difficulties ahead, Saltzman said.

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“They said, ‘You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get anybody to sit up and take note of the need to battle what is still a pandemic, and it’s much easier to get people interested in AIDS in Africa than in AIDS in Canada because we have this amnesia, we think it’s all gone because it isn’t as bad as it was in the 1980s when people were dying a lot,’” Saltzman said.

In fact, statistics provided by the society show that while the face of HIV/AIDS is changing, it isn’t going away. The latest figures show:

• there were about 71,300 people living with HIV/AIDS in Canada in 2011, 25 per cent of whom are undiagnosed, meaning they’re unaware of their HIV status.

• 3,175 new cases were diagnosed in 2011.

• while the vast majority of those diagnosed were gay or bisexual men when the virus first emerged, only 46.6 per cent of new infections in 2011 were among that group, with 37.2 per cent attributed to heterosexual contact.

• women represented 23.8 per cent of new HIV cases in 2011, up from 12 per cent prior to 1998, and First Nations people represented 12.2 per cent of new cases, despite representing only 2.5 per cent of the population.

Activist Brian Huskins — who has lived with HIV for 22 years — agreed with Saltzman’s assessment.

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“There was a time when with a project like this, you’d just say you were doing it and people would be beating down your door to fund it because they wanted to have their name associated with it because it was the right thing to do. Now the right thing to do is to do it in Africa or Eastern Europe or South America,” Huskins said.

The planned format for the film will be a series of 4- to 6-minute vignettes exploring the lives of people living with the virus and others, including activists, researchers, health-care workers and those who have lost loved ones to AIDS, cutting across all demographic boundaries. With a goal of 15 to 18 vignettes, only three have been completed to date.

“Ric and Simcha are doing this for the same reason I am. None of us have time, it’s not a commercial venture. We just believe it is our duty, our social responsibility,” Saltzman said.

Acclaimed Canadian filmmakers David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan have tentatively agreed to direct segments when their schedules permit and if funding is found to move forward.

Saltzman said he’d also like to persuade Canadian rock star Bryan Adams, a skilled photographer, to direct a segment. But without committed funding, progress on the project is glacial, he noted.

“We’re talking about money that is nothing in the big picture, nothing,” he said.

Huskins said he hopes that the big pharmaceutical companies — which are earning handsome profits through the sale of HIV drugs — will support the project.

“They (companies) have doubled and tripled their market in the last several years and they’re not stepping up to the plate,” Huskins said.

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